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Vapes & Butts is a meditation on memory, transformation, and the environmental imprint of human habits. Drawing inspiration from Irving Penn’s Cigarettes series, a body of work photographed in the same month and year I was born, this project reconnects with the past to question the present. Although I’ve never smoked, tobacco use has long been part of my family story, from my Grandfather’s pipe to the cigarette breaks of my friends and family members. These quiet, second-hand memories have shaped my awareness of smoking’s deeper cultural, health, and environmental implications.
This work continues Penn’s visual inquiry, but through a contemporary lens. I collect and photograph discarded cigarette butts, vapes, and joints; artifacts of a global habit that’s evolved in form but not in consequence. Found mostly near a local high school, these objects are stripped from their urban environment and recontextualized as art objects. Their synthetic surfaces and saturated colours speak to the shifting nature of what we consider attractive, valuable, or worth our attention.
Printed using the 19th-century palladium technique, with added layers of gum bichromate for colour, the images are rendered with intention and permanence offering a stark contrast to the disposable nature of their subjects. This slow, deliberate process mirrors the tension within the work itself: between waste and permanence, attraction and toxicity, familiarity and discomfort.
Vapes & Butts is both a tribute and a continuation. By revisiting Penn’s language and updating it for a world now grappling with vaping and e-waste, I hope to reflect how cultural habits persist and mutate. Through these images, I invite viewers to reconsider what we throw away, how value is assigned, and how memory lives in the overlooked. Ultimately, this series aims to spark conversation about presence, responsibility, and what we leave behind.